A Layer of Dust
by viggen
Summary: A contemplation of the nature of the world. My very first Gunnm work, now around seven years old... but, what the hey?


Battle Angel Alita: A Layer of Dust  
By viggen 

So what was it like soaring through the heavens...

There was an old tale told often to youngsters in the Scrapyard about a time when people flew along side the bird on wings of steel and plastic. Alita had heard the story often during the times that Ido served as her father. Way back then when he was still alive. If Desty Nova could be trusted to bring him back from the dead.

Alita sat on the rock overlooking a patch of green. She had never seen a patch of natural green so large. All over the patch, which extended no wider than an alley way and no longer than a good sized auto, were blossoms of color that sprang from the ground with a fierceness that had been dampened by centuries. For the life of her, she couldn't begin to liken the tiny phenomenon to anything she'd ever seen.

In Al Hambra, when she'd taken Figure there, she'd seen tons of green overgrowing the broken skeletons of yesteryear's humankind. Gigantic buildings innondated with, what had Figure called them... Vines? And yet somehow, there had been no real color. Though Alita had been impressed, Figure had told her of an island he had visited where the green was even more rampant. In the corner of his voice, there had been a sad quiver when he'd said that the island been swallowed by the sea. Even greater was his sorrow when he had told that the green of Las Hambra was slowly whithering, dying away as a result of bad air blown in from the Scrapyard several hundred miles to the east.

During several of her shorties away from the Scrapyard, Alita had seen another sort of green. In the factory farms, there were mile upon mile of neat rows of living golden green. Spaced neatly, the rows, which had all been of uniform color, were maintained be doleful workers who often tripped and stumbled carrying the dull tools with which they trowed the ground. Alita remembered how the workers would stumble onto the field with the sounding of one bell, then back off again at the tone of another. They would trundle along between those dreary rows of uniform gold-green, their footsteps churning up fine dust from the force fed ground. Despite the continued claim to life by the sorrowful species of man, there was no color of green.

Yet here in a forgotten nook, not a stone's throw from the Scrapyard itself, was a miniscule miracle that defied all that any could come to believe. In its carefully recessed bit of shade, the slender garden plot over grew itself in a manner Alita had never seen. Boisterous wildflowers of inconcieved variety packed together with grasses and shrubs in among the wind smoothed rocks of the shallow ravine. In the center of the ancient, millennia old wasteland, a scratch on the very face of death had come into being as though spontaniously.

As Alita sat there, still as she could, she began to wonder if the thing would make its appearance again. It was an impossible thing, born from an impossible place that stirred the fibers of her imagination. Alita had never seen a thing like it. Not once. Holding her breath, she became as calm and motionless as she could. Straining her ears, she could faintly detect the rustle above the soft howling of the desert wind. Squinting her eyes, she could make out the almost nonexistant stirring of several branches in a clump of brilliantly flowered shrubs that occupied the dead middle of the cleft. Alita stretched smoothly forward, attempting not to make any hard movements so as to keep from disturbing the tiny what-ever-it-was that was moving in the branches.

She had spent the entire morning tracking it, the elusive little thing, waiting sometimes minutes until it made a sound again. Every passing hour of her search had lent to greater and greater anticipation as she hoped against hope that she would see something that wasn't possible any more. Each time she had paused, waiting while the seconds drew into minutes for the next hardly detectable sound, she could feel the tingling excitement growing within her. Then, at that last moment of disbelief, she had round the boulder blocking her sight to this miniature eden that she'd stumbled upon. Her surprise had been complete.

Now, sitting on a boulder at the edge of a cleft, she concentrated on the noises emmanating from the pint-sized utopia. With effort born from long practice, most of which she no longer remembered, Alita was able to screen out the noise from the trickle of unseen water. She ignored the thrum of impossible insects that, until a moment before, had captivated her. There was something else amid the whispered symphony of life that she could barily detect. A thing that she knew to be infinitely more divine.

She concentrated harder than she had before. Concentrating, waiting. Concentrating as she had at that undefined point in her past that she sometimes came so close to recalling. Concentrating in all the hopes of attaining that one thing that always eluded her. That one thing that she could never clearly articulate.

"Yoko..." The voice came unbidden. She startled her eyes open, not quite realizing that she had almost gotten there again. From the depths of her memory the voice spoke out, reaching across the ages to touch her mind. Reaching out from a place to which she never expected to return.

"Yoko..."

Before her eyes, as clear and real as life experience was the gigantic red mountain that haunted her least remembered dreams. The unknown home was suddenly all around her, with its eerie slopes of unlet blood rising toward a sky stained the color of rose. Materializing out of the floating dust before her was the shape of a man whose name she couldn't recall.

"You must breathe, Yoko, breathe to think. Think to move. Move to breathe. It is all the same."

She could see the cybernetics of his arms and legs though his face dissappeared into the shadow of late day. His time worn cloak fluttered about his indescript body like a flag left too long on its pole.

"But Master," she replied, not certain how she knew he was the master. Not certain really what he was the master of, or even where he had come from.

"You must always remember this lesson if you are to find the true core of what is. What you have attained is something not to be dissmissed, young angel, it is to be forever perfected and honed. Even with your double-X chromosome body, you've survived the Panzer Kunst training...Warrior Yoko."

"Master!?"

"Before you leave, I will pass along to you the Geheimnis, the Ultimate secret..." With an abrupt flash the sequence was gone from the crystal clarity. Broken as though by a soprano note of the perfect pitch, the memory began to scatter. She could see the mountain of red as it slipped away, feel its slopes and touch its essence, but the alien air became foul. She could feel the burning in her lungs.

...the great secret we strive to attain through the rigorous training...to shed aside all the extra and reduce ourselves to the bare necessity of what needs to be. Observe the Ars Magna, the flesh of the universe, the core of being. Achieving an understanding of the most simple by striving continually through the most complex...

Faint hints of a hundred different lectures fluttered through the mind's eye, each dipping and swooping on wings of gossimer thread. There was the ancient semblance of a cohesive structure that was long past forgotten. A network of memories and thoughts that clung together with a tenacity that was no longer describable. Yet through it all, the pattern in the background came so close to the surface. Breath, the semblance of all that lived, defied entropy as a result of entropy. Thought was the cumulation of all that breathed, driven toward order by the very thrust of dissorder. Movement was the roll down that hill toward oblivion that, by virtue of the slide, drove the greatest eddy in nature to draw its next breath. All of the other facets of life were stripped away to reveal a thing so alien in its purity and truth that humanity may have never even considered it.

The secret of order and chaos came clear through the mists of time. The essence of Chi formed itself into a perfect ring that filled her mind with a blinding brightness that forced her to open her eyes. This time truly open her eyes. Beneath the ages of disuse, the basis of Panzer Kunst unfolded like a bossoming flower.

Squinting her eyes, Alita looked once again at the world of desert and hopelessness. She blinked several times, trying to clear the fog that seemed to slow time to a crawl. Nearing the horizon, the sun attested to the length of her fugue, taunting her at how obvious the truth should've appeared. Openning before her was the cleft of green, just as she'd left it. Through the mist of vision not fully awakened, Alita caught a whisp of motion. It came toward her on wings of downy tan, gliding perfectly smooth through the still sky of impending dusk. It hung there a moment, an ornithopter of nature's own design, silhouetted against the fire that lit the clouds bright with deadening sun. Then it settled in her lap as though it had been there a thousand times before. Balanced on pencil thin legs, looking up at her with wide, black eyes was a little bird.

In a corner of her mind, passing into obscurity as time resumed its normal pace, was the distant voice from so long ago. Receeding into memory, the voice was unusually careworn, "You've earned those wings Warrior Yoko, it is left to you to use them..." Then all hints of the master's identity were gone, lost again into the unspoken past as they always were.

Alita found herself looking down at the bold little bird that perched so daintily in her lap. It was illegal to fly beneath Tiphares. Illegal.

Glancing back toward the horizon, in the direction of the setting sun, Alita coulds seen the shady outline of the midair city suspended by its massive shaft. Beneath the behemouth city, no more than a half a day's walk distant, was the Scrapyard. In that deplorable cesspool of humanity, all other life had been exterminated or altered to fit the surrounding. Only those creatures that could survive on mans terms were allowed to live unmolested. Beneath the disk of the great sky city, the last great law that was enforced to the letter was the one that prohibited flight.

Yet here in her lap, secluded by only the tiniest bit of ground from the enforcement of that law was a living example of the thing most prohibited. Alita exchanged gazes with the fearless little animal, wondering in dumbfounded delight why it was so tolerant of the presence of a representitive of its greatest enemy. Surely it knew that humanity had destroyed the rest of its kind...

With the falling sun, the air began to cool rapidly toward its fridged night time temperature. Shadows began to consume the green cleft in a pool of blackness against the monochrome desert. Alita jumped when a soft moaning sound arose from nearby. The bird too startled at the sorrowfilled sound and flew off. Alita watched the bird dissappear back into its little shrub, wondering at the low voice that was gradually raising in pitch. As the air temperature decreased, the noice grew to resemble a soft human voice. Almost the tone of someone weeping quietly.

Where was the sound coming from? Alita stood gradually, shouldering her combat rifle against the folds of her cloak. Standing quietly at the side of the cleft, Alita tried to track the noise with her keen cybernetic ears. Finally deciding that the sound was originating at the far side of the cleft, she considered how best to isolate the source. Moving slowly along the rocks ringing the small garden, Alita followed the voice. With each step she came closer to the eerie dirge.

From the angle that the voice was coming out of the shallow recess, Alita could soon tell that she was standing directly above where the voice was originating. She sat down on her knees, trying to get in good position to lean head first over the side of the cleft in order to inspect the short wall even though there was no real places to which she could cling without damaging the rocks in the process. With some debate, she decided instead to lower herself bodily into the waste deep cleft and attempt not to disturb the foliage.

Dropping into the shallow garden as carefully as she could, Alita could hear the voice grow in volume with proximity. On her left thigh, she could feel the motion of air whoosing past her leg into the wall. She squatted down toward the movement of air to find a narrow break in the back wall of the recess.

Alita laughed aloud, feeling the river of air moving all around her as she stood in front of the vent. It tingled her face and whipped at her hair like a living thing. There was no doubt in her mind that the vent signified a cavern of considerable size beyond it. For a long while, she stood there a revelled as the earth drew in a long breath that whistled through the narrow corridor into the ground.

Looking hard into the reaches of the tunnel, Alita realized the there was a slight hint of light flowering along the darkened interior. It hadn't been there when Alita had first looked into the tube, but was gradually strengthening even in proportion to the dimming of the sky toward night. Where could it be coming from? she asked herself. Reaching into the narrow tunnel, she found hand holds with which to pull herself in.

After several long minutes of careful work so as not to disturb the mat of moss on which she found herself lying, Alita worked herself into the tunnel. Very definitely, the glow from beyond became stronger. Pulling herself to a kink in the tube, she pulled herself forward one last time so that she could look around the bend.

Around the corner, the tube narrow slightly, though very likely enough to impede further passage. Beyond the narrow, the tube openned up into...nothing. Not just any nothing, but the sort of vast nothingness that an empty stadium contained. A vast stadium that contained an entire valley's worth of trees and plants.

Blinking several times to make certain that the image wasn't impossible, Alita gasped at what she was seeing. Illuminated by periodic pricks through the surface of the desert was a cavity that contained an impossible amount of life. Fingers of light reached down from the ceilling of the cavern toward a sea of plants and trees in among the skeletons of ruined buildings. The flora was so thick that it resembled the sea just as Alita had seen it at Las Hambra. Faintly, she could hear the calls of all sorts of animals from the valley of the past.

In the distance, she realized that the illumination of the cleft was coming from the reflection of a beam of light off the surface of an enormous lake. Rapidly the light was shifting away from of the surface of the lake and returning the tube back into darkness.

Alita looked hard for another couple of seconds before deciding that it was time to leave while there was still enough light to see. She hoped at the core of her heart that the image would be burned for all time onto the back of her eyes. As quickly as she was able, Alita withdrew from the tube. In short order, she was once again standing on the rocks that ringed the cleft.

Standing there, she watched the sun fall behind the lem of the earth leaving the sky a final shade of dark purple. Wiping a tear from her eye, she turned on heel and started out across the desert. Behind her, the cleft dissappeared into its camoflage of sand.

As Alita walked, a wind began to blow across the floor of the barren land, whipping her cloak up behind her as though it was a pair of ethereal wings.

Abruptly Lou's voice came through the comm and piped straight into Alita's mind, "Good to see you're ready to get back to work. How was your little day off?"

"You could say I saw the light beneath the dust," Alita mused to herself as she walked.

fin..


End file.
